Get Your Free Credit Score & Monitoring

2. Meet With Lenders

Now you’re ready to meet with a mortgage lender or broker – or several — to ask their advice on how to boost your credit score. These early chats also prepare you for mortgage shopping, letting you see and compare lenders’ styles, knowledge and helpfulness.

Ask them what documents you’ll need to submit when you apply. New federal mortgage rules make it harder to get a mortgage. You’ll be judged on eight points:

Income and assets.

Employment.

Child support or alimony obligations.

Credit history.

Monthly payments on debts.

What you can afford to pay monthly on a mortgage.

Other mortgage costs, like home and mortgage insurance and property taxes.

Your remaining income.

For the best rates, all of your monthly payments must be less than 43% of your pretax monthly income.

3. Pull Your Credit Score

It’s hard to get a free FICO score. You’ll see ads for so-called free credit scores, but these aren’t the scores lenders see. They might do, though, if you only need a benchmark to watch how your efforts are improving it.

FICO charges $20 for your score, and it may not be exactly the same score that lenders see. Money Talks News founder Stacy Johnson suggests one way around the cost: Sign up for a free trial of FICO’s ScoreWatch to get your free score, and then cancel.

Get Your Free Credit Score & Monitoring

4. Beef Up Your Score

Making an effort to raise your score matters, especially if your score is near the top or bottom of a credit score range.

For example, with a score of 745, you’re near the top of the 700-759 range. With effort, you might gain enough points to move into the highest category, 760-850, giving you access to lower interest rates.

Or suppose your score is 766. Credit scores bounce around all the time; you don’t want yours dropping below 760, which puts you in the less desirable 700-759 category. Try to boost your score at least into the safe middle of the 760-850 range.

5. First the Mortgage, Then the House

You’re probably itching to start shopping for a home. That’s fun, but keep your head on straight. Shop for the mortgage first. Looking for a home often gets emotions and fantasies all fired up, tempting shoppers to spend more than they can afford.

Window shopping? Fine. But stay sober. Mortgage shopping first lets you know what you can afford, including all the other big expenses of homeownership — taxes, insurance, homeowner fees, bank fees, repairs, appliances, maintenance and improvements.

6. Get Preapproved (Not Pre-qualified)

Pre-qualifying is just a quick credit check based on the information an individual provides. A preapproval, however, means a mortgage professional has checked the employment history, verified funds, studied an individual’s credit record and so forth. Getting preapproved rather than pre-qualified saves a lot of heartache.

By preapproving your loan, the bank commits to lending you up to a specific amount. That can impress sellers. And it helps when you’re competing with other buyers for a home.

The bad news: Fewer banks are preapproving mortgages lately. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and shop around.

8. Hold Off Applying for Credit

Applying for new credit is a tricky thing. It can help improve your credit score – in the long term. But if you open a new credit card or take out another loan too near the time of your mortgage application, your credit score could dip and affect your interest rate.

However, applying for mortgages won’t have much impact. MyFICO says:

Looking for new credit can equate with higher risk, but most credit scores are not affected by multiple inquiries from auto, mortgage or student loan lenders within a short period of time. Typically, these are treated as a single inquiry and will have little impact on the credit score.

9. Wait to Make Big Purchases

Buying furniture, appliances, a car or any substantial purchase outside your regular monthly expenses could kill your mortgage loan. Before your loan closes, a lender makes a final credit check. New debts could change your eligibility. Says The New York Times:

“We tell our clients about this upfront, and keep reminding them through the entire process not to go buy a new bed or a refrigerator,” said Michael Daversa, the president and founder of Atlantic Residential Mortgage, which is based in Westport, Conn. “What you’re supposed to do is keep everything status quo,”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Sign up for our Credit Report Card and receive the latest tips & advice from our team of 50+ credit and money experts as well as a FREE Credit Score and action plan. Sign up now.

Comments on articles and responses to those comments are not provided or commissioned by a bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by a bank advertiser. It is not a bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

Please note that our comments are moderated, so it may take a little time before you see them on the page. Thanks for your patience.

Certain credit cards and other financial products mentioned in this and other sponsored content on Credit.com are Partners with Credit.com. Credit.com receives compensation if our users apply for and ultimately sign up for any financial products or cards offered.

Hello, Reader!

Thanks for checking out Credit.com. We hope you find the site and the journalism we produce useful. We wanted to take some time to tell you a bit about ourselves.

Our People

The Credit.com editorial team is staffed by a team of editors and reporters, each with many years of financial reporting experience. We’ve worked for places like the New York Times, American Banker, Frontline, TheStreet.com, Business Insider, ABC News, NBC News, CNBC and many others. We also employ a few freelancers and more than 50 contributors (these are typically subject matter experts from the worlds of finance, academia, politics, business and elsewhere).

Our Reporting

We take great pains to ensure that the articles, video and graphics you see on Credit.com are thoroughly reported and fact-checked. Each story is read by two separate editors, and we adhere to the highest editorial standards. We’re not perfect, however, and if you see something that you think is wrong, please email us at editorial team [at] credit [dot] com,

The Credit.com editorial team is committed to providing our readers and viewers with sound, well-reported and understandable information designed to inform and empower. We won’t tell you what to do. We will, however, do our best to explain the consequences of various actions, thereby arming you with the information you need to make decisions that are in your best interests. We also write about things relating to money and finance we think are interesting and want to share.

In addition to appearing on Credit.com, our articles are syndicated to dozens of other news sites. We have more than 100 partners, including MSN, ABC News, CBS News, Yahoo, Marketwatch, Scripps, Money Magazine and many others. This network operates similarly to the Associated Press or Reuters, except we focus almost exclusively on issues relating to personal finance. These are not advertorial or paid placements, rather we provide these articles to our partners in most cases for free. These relationships create more awareness of Credit.com in general and they result in more traffic to us as well.

Our Business Model

Credit.com’s journalism is largely supported by an e-commerce business model. Rather than rely on revenue from display ad impressions, Credit.com maintains a financial marketplace separate from its editorial pages. When someone navigates to those pages, and applies for a credit card, for example, Credit.com will get paid what is essentially a finder’s fee if that person ends up getting the card. That doesn’t mean, however, that our editorial decisions are informed by the products available in our marketplace. The editorial team chooses what to write about and how to write about it independently of the decisions and priorities of the business side of the company. In fact, we maintain a strict and important firewall between the editorial and business departments. Our mission as journalists is to serve the reader, not the advertiser. In that sense, we are no different from any other news organization that is supported by ad revenue.

Visitors to Credit.com are also able to register for a free Credit.com account, which gives them access to a tool called The Credit Report Card. This tool provides users with two free credit scores and a breakdown of the information in their Experian credit report, updated twice monthly. Again, this tool is entirely free, and we mention that frequently in our articles, because we think that it’s a good thing for users to have access to data like this. Separate from its educational value, there is also a business angle to the Credit Report Card. Registered users can be matched with products and services for which they are most likely to qualify. In other words, if you register and you find that your credit is less than stellar, Credit.com won’t recommend a high-end platinum credit card that requires an excellent credit score You’d likely get rejected, and that’s no good for you or Credit.com. You’d be no closer to getting a product you need, there’d be a wasted inquiry on your credit report, and Credit.com wouldn’t get paid. These are essentially what are commonly referred to as "targeted ads" in the world of the Internet. Despite all of this, however, even if you never apply for any product, the Credit Report Card will remain free, and none of this will impact how the editorial team reports on credit and credit scores.

Our Owners

Credit.com is owned by Progrexion Holdings Inc. which is the owner and administrator of a number of business related to credit and credit repair, including CreditRepair.com, and eFolks. In addition, Progrexion also provides services to Lexington Law Firm as a third party provider. Despite being owned by Progrexion, it is not the role of the Credit.com editorial team to advocate the use of the company’s other services. In articles, reporters may mention credit repair as an option, for example, but we’ll also be sure to note the various alternatives to that service. Furthermore, you may see ads for credit repair services on Credit.com, but the editorial team isn’t responsible for the creation or implementation of those ads, anymore than reporters for the New York Times or Washington Post are responsible for the ads on their sites.

Your Stories

Lastly, much of what we do is informed by our own experiences as well as the experiences of our readers. We want to tell your stories if you’re interested in sharing them. Please email us at story ideas [at] credit [dot] com with ideas or visit us on Facebook or Twitter.